* * *
Salvaging the vehicles, John Connor thought, lips thin as he pondered.
Some distant part of his mind was conscious that he'd gone into combat mode—what he thought of as his Great Military Dick-head mind-set—but there was less resentment in the thought than there had been. The sight of the shining alloy-steel skulls had brought it home, more harshly than anything since the T-1000 had walked through the bars of the mental institution like living liquid metal.
But they're not living, he told himself. And they tend to be a bit single-minded. They see the optimum given their data and go for it. Let's introduce a chaos factor here.
He looked at the side of the road. The cutting was nearly cliff steep, an ideal slaughter pen, but right here the ground rose steeply… not quite too steeply…
He reached into the saddlebags and took out a haversack he'd prepared on the just-in-case theory, checked the shotgun in the saddle scabbard before his right knee, and then dropped a half-dozen thermite grenades into the pockets of his shabby, smelly bush jacket.
So, Lancelot probably smelled, too, with that padding they wore under their armor, he thought.
"Yippee!" he shouted aloud, gunning the engine until the blue smoke rose around him. "I'm coming, you metal motherfuckers!"
Then he let the bike go, throwing itself up the rocky slope, slewing between boulders and jumping small ravines with tooth-clattering shocks while he crouched over the handlebars and ;grinned a grin that was more than half snarl.
It got a little easier when he reached the crest, the drop-off blurring by to his left; but now he had to spare a few half seconds' flickering glance to trace the convoy moving below. Bus leading, and yes!
A boulder, wedged with two others, but on a downslope toward the cutting and the road. He reached into the canvas haversack and twisted the fuse; there was a hissing, and he now had exactly twenty-eight seconds.
Twenty-seven, twenty-six…
He pulled the sling that held it off over his head, swung the whole mass of the satchel charge—a brick of Semtex and the detonator—around his head and pitched it accurately under the side of the boulder away from the road; it landed with a soft thump and lay, trailing a line of thin blue smoke.
John gave another Comanche screech as he spun the motorcycle around, balanced perilously for an instant on the back wheel as it spat gravel behind him, then fell down on the front and gave the throttle all it had.
The thermite grenade was a smooth heavy green cylinder in his hand. Usually he despised people who pulled the pins on grenades with their teeth—showy, hard on your teeth, a macho-asshole sort of thing to do—but this time there wasn't any alternative. It came free, and he spat the pin aside without any damage to his enamel.
There was a huge crump sound from behind him. He ducked lower, conscious of rock fragments whistling by, then skidded to a halt where a twisted pine gave him some shelter from the roadway. There he looked behind; the ten-ton granite boulder seemed to be floating in midair, and then vanished as it plunged toward the roadway fifty feet below.
CRA SH- TINKLE- TINKLE- WHUDD UMP.
John craned his head to see; the noise had been stunning, even thirty yards away. The boulder had landed right over the rear wheels of the lead bus, and the fuel tank had already caught fire— probably sparks, as the ponderous weight tore metal and sheared pipes. The last truck was already beginning to reverse.
"Naughty, naughty!" John shouted, and opened his hand to let the spoon fly away from the grenade.
He didn't have to toss it far; more of a drop with a bit of a boost. It fell where he'd aimed it, at the gap right behind the cab… just as the fuse set off the filling of powdered aluminum and ferric oxide packed into the magnesium shell. The stab of light was white and painful; that reaction went fast, and it hit nearly five thousand degrees. The fuel tank blew a few seconds later and sent the cab and engine of the last truck catapulting forward into the rear of the next.
Ain't none of you homicidal transports going nowhere, John thought with savage satisfaction.
That left nearly two hundred and fifty people back there, with the Terminators approaching. They'd have heard the explosions.
"Gotta surprise 'em," he muttered to himself. Now, where won't they be expecting me to come from?
He looked back. The slope off to his left was fairly clear; there was even a lip or ramp projecting out a few feet. The cut was fairly narrow…
Even as he raced back to give himself enough of a run, he could hear his mother's voice screeching in his head that it was too risky—that he carried humanity's hopes with him, and a few hundred individuals were nothing compared to that.
"Fuck it, Mom. No fate but what we make! Eeeee-ha!"
Besides, what sort of leader never took risks for his people? He was going to need a lot of people willing to take a lot of risks to win this war. Crazy risks, the sort a computer would never take.
He wasn't going to inspire anyone to take them by hiding in a bunker.
The rear wheel skidded again, then caught. He felt the wind pushing at him, forcing its way through the thick fabric of his jacket as he built speed in a frenzied dash. Then he hit the upward-sloping lip of rock and he was in the air, soaring above the burning trucks below—all of them had caught now.
Balancing on nothing, heat buffeting him, scraps of burning canvas going past.
He hit the solid rock on the other side of the cutting perfectly, but hard enough that he nearly lost control and smeared out for a moment.
"Spine compressed like a Slinky," he wheezed, then pulled up and used one booted foot to skid himself into a left turn. "She'll no take much more, Cap'n."
The slope ahead of him was fissured rock and boulders and pine, growing thicker as he headed down toward the beginning of the cut and the roadway—where the people were trapped in a slaughter pen they didn't even know about. He couldn't take it slowly; right now, recklessness was the only safety.
"Go, go, go!" he shouted to himself, bending forward and pulling the shotgun out of its scabbard.
Down into the forest, branches slashing at his face… and a glint of polished alloy steel.
Right behind a fallen log. The motorcycle left the ground again, and a bolt of eye-hurting light speared below the wheels.
Where it struck, rock and wet wood exploded into fragments.
"Eat this!" John shouted, and fired the shotgun like a giant pistol.
The recoil nearly tore it out of his hands, and nearly threw the cycle on its side as he landed. He recovered in a looping sideways skid, waiting for the plasma bolt that would turn him into an exploding cloud of carbon compounds.
It didn't come. The solid slug from the shotgun had hit just where he aimed it; all those years of shooting everything his mother could find from any and all positions, moving and still, had paid off. Dieter's training, too…
"Thanks, guys," he said, pulling up beside the Terminator.
The door-knocker round had hit just below where the metal skull joined the neck-analogue. It wasn't dead, but a shock like that could knock it out for a few seconds and make it reboot; he tossed the shotgun up, caught it by the slide, jacked another round into the breech, and fired again. This time one of the red-glinting eyes shattered, and the "skull" turned three-quarters of the way around.
The Terminator's weapon lay near it; John grunted as he lifted it. "Thirty pounds, minimum," he wheezed as he put-putted slowly away.